Posted by Jim Higson on 09/13/05 18:00

Spartanicus wrote:

> "Alan J. Flavell" <flavell@physics.gla.ac.uk> wrote:
>
>>That kind of factor sure makes a difference in the text display stakes,
>>just as it did in the CRT era when I compared an acquaintance's CRT
>>display set below 90dpi, against mine set at around 135dpi (to the disdain
>>of the peanut gallery who told me I had no business to set it higher than
>>the CRT's inherent dot pitch, but it worked for me).
>
> The name called reference would be me.
>
> Contrary to what is alleged I did not tell Mr Flavell that "he had no
> business to set it higher than the inherent dot pitch". What I did tell
> Mr Flavell was that it's wrong to blame others for issues caused by the
> misconfiguration of his own hardware.
>
> Many people are confused about the issue of resolution on CRT monitors,
> they think that by increasing the Screen Area setting, the resolution
> follows suit. For colour CRT monitors this is only true up to a certain
> point. Colour CRTs use a mask and phosphor clusters known as "dots",
> these dots have a physical dimension referred to in specifications as
> "dot pitch" [1]. A few examples: 0.24mm dot pitch = ~105PPI max
> resolution, 0.27mm dot pitch = ~94PPI max resolution.

As an aside, I used to actually quite like the effect of a CRT at
resolutions above what the dot pitch said it could handle. So long as it
didn't bring down the refresh rate, the low-GPU fake antialiasing in games
looked fine, just like my 640*480 console looks less pixelated on a 23 inch
TV than my 1280x1024 computer does on a 19 inch monitor.

> Mr Flavell has his Screen Area setting at a value considerably beyond
> what his CRT is capable of displaying, the consequence of doing that is
> that definition is lost. This makes text difficult to read, to
> compensate he has configured his browser's default font size to a higher
> setting. People who misconfigure their hardware like that then often
> blame web authors for their problems.
>
> Another issue that Mr Flavell is confused about are high resolution
> screens. The 200PPI monitors referred to by him are not intended, or
> suitable for general usage. Bitmapped resources (icons, buttons and
> other UI elements, images etc.) shrink down to a size that is very
> difficult to use.

Hmmm... what is the current state of vector interfaces? I think I read
somewhere GNOME uses lazy rasterised SVG for all icons etc. I might have
been reading about a future version, mind.

Maybe future very high res screens are where Opera will gain greater use,
because it can zoom the bitmapped parts as well as increase the text size.

> What Mr Flavell doesn't get is that these screens are
> intended to be used in a dual monitor setup in conjunction with a
> monitor with a normal resolution which displays the OS and the
> application UI.
>
> Such a setup is valuable for people who create work for print on
> computer screens such as print cartographers. By using a 200PPI screen
> to display the work they get a better view of what the result will be on
> paper.
>
> [1] More often than not the dot pitch figure listed by manufacturers is
> not realistic, it may refer to the size of the grid pitch (the grid lies
> a certain distance behind the phosphor dots), or it refers to the
> vertical dot pitch only.
>

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